Time capsule: The Rough Guide to the Internet… from 1999

Ars takes a look back at the Internet of a decade ago as seen through the lens …

1999 was in some ways a simpler time, a bygone era in which a leading Internet guidebook's first page could open with the question: "Okay, what's this Internet good for?"

The book then follows this question up with a host of others.

"Is there a lot of really weird stuff on the Net?"

"But isn't it yet another male-dominated bastion?"

"What's electronic mail, again?"

"So, is this the Information Superhighway?"

Well, yes, it is the "Information Superhighway," a term which itself sounds straight out of a previous century, but it's not the superhighway that we're driving on today. When Ars Science Editor John Timmer unearthed a copy of 1999's Rough Guide to the Internet, we decided to take a look back at just what has changed in the last decade—and what has remained depressingly the same.

A simpler time before P2P and RSS

If you need convincing that ten years of Internet development has fundamentally reshaped the Internet, consider: Google does not appear in the Rough Guide's index. In the section on search engines, the book notes that the best are AltaVista, HotBot, and Northern Light, with HotBot the top pick.

The Rough Guide to the Internet, 1999 edition

Getting your jalopy onto the information superhighway required little in the way of horsepower, with the Rough Guide recommending a 486 SX25 or a Mac 68030 series with 8MB of RAM.

And, while cable and DSL were becoming available (and are both mentioned in the guide), most attention was still paid to dial-up modems. Quick show of hands: who remembers what a 16550 UART could do for your modem?

More interesting than the mere technical details and slower connection speeds, though, is the entire Internet experience. A read through the Rough Guide reminds us that the Internet in those days was both less commercial and less professional than it is now, and the book's listings don't focus on commerce or content as much as they do on communication.

The book's main focus is on getting connected and then communicating with others through e-mail, IRC, and Usenet discussions. A mere four alt.binaries.* groups are included in the Usenet list, reminding us that Usenet was once a hub for actual discussions about "Klezmer developments" and "Don Juan yarns," rather than the file-swapping paradise that today inspires people to pay a monthly subscription fee for full newsfeed access.

Even the book's other main section, a huge collection of World Wide Web sites, feels distinctly weirder and more amateur than such lists would be today. Under "Entertainment," for instance, there are a few truly commercial sites like Sony.com, but they are the exception. The first entertainment item on the list is a site that allowed you to "enter a URL and surf the Web backwards" (called, appropriately enough, "!sdrawkcab").

Other entertainment sites include the "Avenger's Handbook," an "armory of nastiness" based in Norway that offered guidance on getting revenge. "Driveways of the Rich & Famous" pretty much explains itself, as does "Famous Birthdays." A lockpicking tutorial makes the cut, as does the I Ching, a Tarot site, and "The 80s Server." Looking at lists of sites like "Virtual Voodoo Doll" soon drives home the point that this was a Web without online music stores, without YouTube, Hulu, or Netflix, and without P2P.

The same amateurism—a word not meant as an insult—extends to the "Kids" section. Today, such a list would be overrun with corporations peddling 3D worlds, online Flash games, and interactive Barney coloring books. In 1999, the list featured plenty of items like "Bizarre Things You Can Make in Your Kitchen," "Children's Literature Web Guide," "Fantastic Fractals," "Math Magic Activities," and "Mr. Edible Starchy Tuber Head." Many such sites were still hosted on university servers.

Not that 1999 was a complete alien landscape; RealPlayer was around, as were Java and Shockwave. Spam was an issue, Quake was being played online, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation was waging war against censorship and in favor of privacy. Researchers estimated that "90 percent of network traffic was consumed by porn images," wiretapping and encryption debates consumed national capitals, and online child porn prosecutions began.

Where is my jetpack Internet airship?

The one aspect of online life that might be expected to have changed the most—actually connecting to the Internet—hasn't changed in quite the ways that were predicted back in 1999. Traditional dial-up modems have largely disappeared, but the Rough Guide already noted the existence of cable and DSL in 1999. Cable was said to reach speeds of 10Mbps, while ADSL could hit 6Mbps—still the max speed for AT&T DSL users, by the way, unless they subscribe to U-Verse.

That speeds haven't increased more in the intervening years is depressing, though cable has recently seen big gains from rolling out DOCSIS 3.0. What has increased, though, is availability. In 1999, getting such service was dicey and often required expensive setup. Horror stories of nonworking broadband installs used to litter the Web.

These days, signing up for broadband no longer feels like a task from the seventh level of hell (you know, the one where Dante stuck all the ISPs), though for many people in the US, there are fewer viable options than there were in 1999. As the guide predicted, "The power to upgrade the backbone, or more correctly backbones, lies in the hands of those who own the major cables and thus effectively control the Internet. Over the next few years, the global telecommunication big guns look set to starve the smaller players out of the market."

In the US, that happened in part as a result of deregulation; telcos no longer had to share lines under managed rates, and cable operators were exempted from ever having to do so. Such policies had given the US plenty of dial-up providers, and the guide lists AT&T, EarthLink, Brigadoon, Concentric, GTE Internet, Locus, Mindspring, MCI Internet, Netcom, PSINet, Prodigy, Sprint, and SpryNet as national US ISPs.

The guide was right that competition did get squeezed, but wrong about the place it would reemerge.

"There's little doubt their biggest competition will come from the skies," it says. "Apart from existing high-speed satellite downlink services from DirecPC, expect to see SkyStation's solar powered stratospheric airships hovering over large cities and beaming down major megabits before the end of this century."

This steampunk-powered vision never quite took hold. Floating Internet airships are hardly a common sight, and satellite proved both slow and laggy enough that it wasn't wanted except as a last choice by mostly rural users. The Rough Guide also didn't predict that competition to the landline duopoly of cable/DSL would eventually come from the mobile phone network rather than satellites, though this could charitably be grouped under "competition from the skies."

Time capsule

This I do not miss.

Reading the book, I was struck by the real lack of nostalgia I felt for those early days of the Web. Sure, pages upon pages about Microsoft's Dial-Up Networking (DUN) tool for Windows brought back memories, but were they good ones? Uh, no.

The same might be said about Netscape 4.0, Web video the size of a postage stamp, Active X plugins, and even Gopherspace. The Web has moved on, mostly for the better.

But there still remains something appealing about 1999's Internet culture that comes through while reading the book. There was an amateur do-it-yourselfness about things that has its own appeal. HTML had to be mucked about with, e-mail settings could be dicey, and downloading files often involved learning to navigate an FTP directory. When it came to content, Hollywood wasn't available, so big niches remained filled by amateurs, or at least small entrepreneurs. And there's something endearing about the fact that, in a list of the best travel websites in the world, Erich's Packing Center could still make the cut in 1999 (tagline: "Erich lives for packing geometric shapes into boxes").

The book also has something of a time capsule quality about it, since many of the sites in question no longer exist (Erich's Packing Center, however, remains up). Godzilla vs. Tamagotchi has vanished into the digital ether, for example, but the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine can still unearth the early versions.

Plenty has changed in the last 10 years, and 1999's Rough Guide highlights those changes in stark fashion. Digging up an old text like this can't help but make readers ponder the way the 'Net has developed (Hulu!) and the ways it hasn't (floating Internet airships!). So have at it in the comments—what 'Net changes from 1999 do you most deplore? And which ones can't you live without?